WS MoreOrLess: The future of food
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, the programme which investigates the numbers in the news and in the world around us. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week we're looking at how much food we'll need to produce to feed the world's population over the next 40 years.
How did the claim 'produce more food in 40 years than the last 10,000' originate?
Listener Rob Ryan-Silver from Maryland in the U.S.
emailed us at moreorless at bbc.co.uk to ask... A recent article in The Economist includes the claim that in the next 40 years, humans will need to produce more food than they did in the previous 10,000 put together. This seems improbable. Would you investigate?
Let's look back to 10,000 years ago, the dawn of agriculture, when the human diet progressed from just a handful of nuts and berries to bread, pasta, cornflakes. I don't think they had cornflakes, Ruth.
This is our Razor Sharp reporter, Hannah Moore. You've been looking into this claim from The Economist. I have. It's actually a quote that's been bandied about a lot. Over the past few years, it's appeared in The Guardian, The LA Times.
Who first made the 10,000-year food claim and how did it spread?
The person who said it originally was William G. Lesher when he was chief executive of the Global Harvest Initiative, an organisation that campaigns for environmental standards in farming. So he was talking about the challenge of producing enough food in the future? Yes. Yes, and it's an arresting claim, but probably inaccurate. I've not been able to find out the basis on which Dr Lesher calculated this, and he's since left the Global Harvest Initiative, but I've spoken to them and they suggested it may be based on an earlier calculation by the scientist Dr Megan Clark when she was chief executive of CSIRO, the Australian government's scientific research agency.
If you looked at all the food that you were producing year after year after year, we realised that from 2010 to 2060, so a period of 50 years from when we did this work, was equal to all the food that had been produced since 1500, since Columbus was sailing around.
Right, so Megan Clark calculated that we'd have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as we did in the past 500.
And perhaps through the force of Chinese whispers, that's turned into we'll need to produce more food by 2050 than we did in the last 10,000 years, as the guy from the Global Harvest Initiative and now The Economist has said. Well, let's take a closer look at Megan Clark's calculation then.
What assumptions did Megan Clark use when estimating future food production?
She says the graph that shows how much food we've been producing over time paints a very clear picture.
Now when we made that graph, of course it starts off very small curve if you think around 1500, but it starts to really curve up around about 1960, really starts to escalate. To make any curve like this, you have to make some assumptions. How much are we going to eat? What are the trends? What's going to happen in various countries? And we know that that's changed over time. We also have to look at waste. You know, we might need to produce now, given that we're shipping our food around the world and we have wastage, we need to produce perhaps 30% more just to be able to feed the world.
How reliable are historical population and calorie estimates for comparing past food production?
So we also need to make assumptions on waste.
But looking closely at how the underlying calculations have been done, we hit a problem. Megan Clark's based her calculations on the idea that there are more people alive today than have ever lived before.
Ah, well, that's a statistic we've looked into before ourselves, isn't it? It's not true. Actually, the dead currently outnumber the living by 15 to 1. And this grand statistical claim that people are making, it can't be an easy thing to work out. We don't know for certain how many people were on Earth 500 years ago, really. We only have accurate population data from around 1800 onwards. I mean, the UK census was first taken in 1801, for example. And we don't know how many calories people were consuming.
What do the UN FAO projections say about calories available by 2050?
But... My investigations led me to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Now, what the number crunches there don't know about what food we're growing and eating isn't worth knowing.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:39
2
How did the claim 'produce more food in 40 years than the last 10,000' originate?
0:39–1:26
3
Who first made the 10,000-year food claim and how did it spread?
1:26–2:51
4
What assumptions did Megan Clark use when estimating future food production?
2:51–3:37
5
How reliable are historical population and calorie estimates for comparing past food production?
3:37–4:22
6
What do the UN FAO projections say about calories available by 2050?
4:22–5:29
7
How do rising incomes, diets and waste affect future food demand?
5:29–7:22
8
Does history show we can meet growing food demand or should we worry?
7:22–9:32